Editorial: Legislators shooting blanks

Our view: Democrats have placed guns in their crosshairs. Lawful gun owners are just collateral damage.

In the eyes of Democrats in the state Legislature, there is no problem that higher taxes cannot cure. So it was sadly unsurprising when the state Legislature sat down to talk about the problem of bad guys with guns, and two legislators said they had a solution.

Higher taxes. Of course.

Democrats, seizing on the opportunity to make the strictest gun laws in the nation even more strict, introduced nine pieces of proposed legislation this week. Certainly more will come. Most were gun control measures, such as banning assault-style rifles. But two of the proposals were additional taxes on ammunition.

Assemblyman Roger Dickenson, D-Sacramento, proposed a tax of a nickel a round, making a box of 100 .22 shells cost $5 more. That tax revenue would be used for mental health screening for children.

Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Alameda, proposed a tax to provide more funding for more cops in high-crime areas.

Since most of the people who buy ammunition are hunters and recreational shooters, usually living a long way from high-crime areas and big cities, both proposals tax law-abiding citizens to pay for a problem they didn't create.

Taxing hunters and target shooters to pay for inner-city cops and mental health exams would be like raising the gas tax to pay for more green energy — there is no connection between the source and the recipient of the windfall.

Rather, it would be just the latest example of legislators using taxes to bludgeon users of products that many Democrats would like to disappear. They can't simply outlaw hunting and fishing, so they make it as inconvenient and expensive as possible. Same with cigarettes, alcohol, and anything else legislators think they can slap with a "sin tax."

There's no doubt crime-ridden cities need more cops, but that doesn't mean hunters and target shooters in the rural north should pay for them. Try carrying legislation making it legal for cities like Oakland and Stockton (cities cited by Bonta) to pass their own local ammo tax.

And before Dickenson worries about mental health screening for children, what about adults? A legislative hearing confirmed Tuesday what Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey told us last week: the state has laws on the books to get tens of thousands of firearms off the streets, but doesn't supply the people to do it.

Ramsey outlined the ways a person can lose his or her gun rights — if you are found guilty of certain crimes, if you have been recently committed to a mental health facility, or if you have a restraining order against you.

The problem is, the state Department of Justice has only 35 investigators statewide tasked with taking those guns out of the hands of prohibited people. A DOJ executive told a legislative committee that his department has a list of 19,700 people who need to be paid a visit by authorities to gather their 39,000 firearms. He said it would cost $25 million just to hire enough staff to be able to whittle down that list in three years.

That seems like a bigger problem to us than questioning little Timmy about his video game habits or picking the pockets of law-abiding citizens to hire more cops to put the bad ones in jail.

Our Legislature needs to learn that new taxes aren't the cure to everything. There's plenty of money floating around Sacramento. The Legislature just needs to learn to prioritize how to spend it.